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Category: DevOps Toolbox

  • How Agile Are Your User Stories?

    How Agile Are Your User Stories?

    Around the world, enterprises are adopting the concept of Agile development. This methodology is based on a set of principles for software development by which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of teams. User stories form the foundation of the Agile requirements process, and teams gather to create them by exploring how users will interact with their solutions. To facilitate planning and discussion, teams typically jot down stories on pieces of paper and then physically arrange and rearrange them. It is a curiously old-school process for such a forward-thinking method.

    User stories are so vital because they give developers just enough information to estimate the level of effort needed to implement the functionality described by the story. When written well, they can be powerful, because they help developers and testers view requirements from a customer’s perspective. They provide context and an understanding of what motivates the people who will use the solutions they deliver.

    Struggles with Stories

    Agile represents a significantly different workflow than developers have previously used. As enterprises work to expand and mature their Agile practices across their projects and teams, they struggle to figure out how user stories fit, because:

    • Developers and testers may prefer user stories over a lengthy, text-heavy business requirements document, but user stories are new to most business stakeholders and business analysts. As organizations try to transition to Agile, these individuals struggle to write high-quality user stories that accurately and sufficiently describe all customer needs. They get bogged down writing and managing them and lose focus on the bigger picture.
    • The number of user stories can get out of hand quickly due to complexity. Most enterprise projects involve the development and enhancement of multiple, integrated systems to deliver functionality for a variety of roles. Users can take many paths that often interconnect and overlap with other processes. This can mean hundreds of user stories for a project of any size. Manually recording and managing the wealth of information that the development team needs is not feasible, and user stories can be missed or misinterpreted in the process.
    • Critical nonfunctional requirements—such as those for compliance, security and performance—complicate the adoption of user stories because they weren’t designed to represent those types of requirements. User stories scribbled on sticky notes or created in an Excel spreadsheet don’t support the rigor enterprises need for audits, change management, history and traceability.

    Enterprises want to reap the benefits of Agile for their complicated, expensive, high-risk projects, but they want to manage complexity and risk as well. They need a robust Agile requirements tool to help them, especially for the creation of reliable, consistent and high-quality user stories.

    Making the Shift to an Agile Requirements Tool

    Just as approaches to development have changed, so has the workplace, necessitating a new approach to teamwork. PricewaterhouseCoopers noted in its paper, “Adopting an Agile Methodology, Requirements Gathering and Delivery“: “As companies shift from small projects and teams engaged in Agile to more complex projects and potentially distributed teams, there is a need to shift from paper and spreadsheets to tools that provide workflow, persistence and traceability.”

    The power of best-in-class requirements management tools is that they enable teams to use user stories for development while making it easier for business stakeholders and business analysts to create them. These tools eliminate the need to manually create user stories within the development teams’ Agile tools. They bridge the gap between traditional and Agile requirements, enabling enterprises to scale Agile while managing enterprise concerns.

    The powerful capability sets of tools such as this help teams to:

    • Generate high-quality user stories and tests automatically from process flows. Product owners and business analysts use customer journeys to automatically generate user stories and acceptance criteria with the click of a button. They push these artifacts into the development teams’ Agile management tool of choice, where developers and testers also have access to related requirements information, such as regulatory information, visual models and constraints, supporting a comprehensive understanding. User stories are reliable and consistent, and there is no longer a need to spend time and money to teach business stakeholders or business analysts to write them.
    • Work together to visually define customer journeys. This allows stakeholders to “tell their stories” as they work with product owners and business analysts to collaboratively define customer journeys. Using the familiar construct of user models—with steps, decision points, actors and condition statements—the entire team collaborates to record and analyze processes in a shared workspace. Teams maintain a focus on strategic objectives when making prioritization decisions and spend less time managing a huge list of user stories manually.
    • Reap the benefits of Agile while using enterprise-level capabilities for visualization, traceability and reuse. Support for visual models and the ability to relate them to one another and other requirements artifacts helps teams establish the precise traceability they need to ensure full requirements and test case coverage. It also supports improved change management and decision-making, ultimately leading to higher-quality software. Customer journey models can be reused across projects and teams, as can user stories and other requirements artifacts, saving time and improving consistency.

    Great strides have been made in Agile requirements management tools recently, but many enterprises are still using sticky notes to create and organize their user stories because they don’t know about what these tools can do. A next-generation tool enables organizations to scale Agile across the business and create a common ground for IT and business to meet. With capabilities including visualization, collaboration, traceability, management analytics and reuse, teams are more effective and applications are delivered faster.

    About the Author / Ruth Zive

    ruthziveRuth Zive is Vice President of Marketing at Blueprint. She is a metrics-driven marketing strategist who has worked for two decades serving B2B clients in the technology, healthcare and financial services industries. At Blueprint, Ruth is responsible for product marketing, analyst relations, branding, demand generation and inside sales initiatives. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously

    Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously

    Almost every product we buy or use today goes through some form of extensive testing before it’s released on the market; typically, these tests are designed to replicate the worst-case scenarios that a product may encounter under real-world conditions.

    Automobiles, for example, go through extensive hot and cold weather testing in remote locations, and are driven over obstacle-laden tracks designed to push the limits of their durability. Even seemingly mundane objects such as children’s toys are exposed to abusive simulations to ensure that they don’t harbor any potentially hidden and harmful effects.

    On the current landscape, applications are the face of your business, often serving as the battleground where consumer loyalty is won or lost. Given this reality, it seems crazy to think that any applications are released having only been exposed to a minimum of tests. Yet, in the name of getting to market quickly, that’s far too often the case.

    As disciplines including agile and continuous delivery continue to increase the speed at which development teams can release software, it’s easy to put the crunch on testing in the rush to get an update released. But that’s a costly mistake in the long run, as research has shown that it is 50 percent less expensive to find an error in testing than to address the same error once it has reached production, and more than 90 percent cheaper  when addressed in the development/coding phase.

    Given the dramatic cost savings of addressing errors in development, clearly the goal of any organization focused on continuous delivery should be to shift testing left so a greater number of defects are found early in the development process. This is what we refer to as continuous testing, and it’s a huge part of the reason why I am so excited about CA’s acquisition of BlazeMeter.

    Performance load testing should be a core element of any continuous testing strategy because it is a critical factor in determining system reliability. Similar to the worst-case scenario testing that consumer products undergo, performance testing can quickly uncover applications defects that might otherwise go unnoticed. After all, the manner in which a system operates with a few hundred concurrent users may be very different than how it runs with thousands of users.

    BlazeMeter enables today’s development, operations and DevOps teams to conduct this critical performance testing earlier in the development process, saving countless hours and resources. The company is also competing—and winning—in a highly competitive marketplace where it has been pitted against much larger, more entrenched competitors.

    Part of the reason BlazeMeter is winning is its focus on offering a SaaS-based solution that is highly cost-effective and easy to engage. Using this model, customers can try  out the testing software with a few clicks, and then quickly move forward to broadly adopt the system. Another catalyst to its success: BlazeMeter was built using open source tools, such as Apache JMeter, used widely in the development community for performance and load testing. As a result, BlazeMeter can easily run and analyze JMeter and other open source-based load tests—such as Selenium, Gatling and Locust—within a commercial-grade performance testing system.

    This combination of a SaaS delivery model and incorporation of open-source tools, augmenting strong performance testing functionality, make BlazeMeter very complementary to CA’s existing continuous delivery solutions, including its CA Service Virtualization, CA Test Data Manager, CA Agile Requirements Designer and CA Release Automation products.

    At CA, we’re committed to providing the most comprehensive, integrated and open continuous delivery ecosystem, allowing our customers to release swiftly, test agilely and constantly increase reliably. The addition of BlazeMeter will further enable customers test continuously, thereby increasing agility and the overall quality of their software, to ensure that applications don’t break down on the side of the virtual road.

    — Aruna Ravichandran

  • How the Lure of an ‘Easy Button’ Installer Traps Projects

    How the Lure of an ‘Easy Button’ Installer Traps Projects

    As preamble for this post, I wrote about the Unicorn Installer challenge. The challenge is that user needs are too deeply heterogeneous for good reasons to create a vertically integrated way (aka an “easy button”) that works for all users. The problem is not just current diversity, it’s also about how we cope with needed changes in the future that would force users to straddle configurations.

    Don’t despair! There is a practical solution to shared ops on project installers: composability.

    If projects focused on maintaining install modules for their specific components, then the community could collaborate on well-bounded problems that should be infrastructure-agnostic. Even building in multiple scripting DSLs (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt or Bash) is a much smaller-scope problem. Further, all of these DSLs have modularity concepts so it’s feasible to pull in community roles/modules/gains/plays into larger automation script. This approach allows us to decouple snowflaked infrastructure and prerequisite configuration from the project configuration.

    At that point, the proverbial “easy button” becomes an opinionated set of project, prerequisite setup and infrastructure-specific steps. These then become vendor-specific buttons: “Press here for the fast AWS install with Dejour SDN and L8istSh9y O/S” as was showcased to great effect at Dockercon.

    With that said, let’s look at how trying to create an “easy button” installer inside the project backfires.

    Cloud Foundry chose to have an in-project installer, BOSH, that has an opinionated installation approach based on generated images. To work, the installer has to maintain an increasing number of BOSH-specific integrations and image generators. These efforts are redundant with other tools non-core to installing Cloud Foundry. Further complicating the story is Pivotal, a primary Cloud Foundry maintainer, which considered BOSH a product differentiator. This creates ecosystem conflict with other Cloud Foundry vendors. While BOSH helps create robust installations, it also drags along a lot of baggage that keeps those improvements from being more generally accessible. For all of the expected ease of installation for BOSH, Cloud Foundry is still considered difficult to install.

    OpenStack installers are a very confusing story, with multiple competing in-project installers. Starting from the single-node DevStack, which provides all of the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) testing to the confusing over-cloud/under-cloud OpenStack-On-OpenStack (aka Triple-O) concept. Neither of these initial in-project attempts created practical, universal installers. In fact, they’ve spawned waves of other installers and configuration scripts. Recently, OpenStack decided to allow many of these attempts into the project (aka “big tent”) without coordinated governance making it impossible for operators to determine which efforts they should be tracking. Having some efforts stamped with “community approved” only makes it more difficult to solve cross-platform issues. The effect is further balkanization, as vendors and advanced operators attempt to build working automation silos against competing interests.

    As a positive example, Linux pre-seed and kickstart options are distribution-specific and support a healthy ecosystem. It would be easy to think of consolidating these installs into a single system; however, the likely result would be to lock together rivals and slow down innovation.

    What we want is a thriving ecosystem around a project without endorsement as one being THE install process.

    Why is lack of endorsement critical? It allows the project to advance without being slowed down by installation entanglements created when a single way is anointed. Worse, it discourages ecosystem activity around the project.

    The first successful installers were targeted at a single vertical stack, such as Kubernetes on CoreOS or a version of Salt Kube-up on Google. These monolithic install approaches are helpful jump-starts but limit community diversity. Yet, if they are presented as “the right way,” then other participants will be discouraged from innovating. It only takes one variation in a vertically integrated process for the whole process to become exception hell.

    Our early experience with Crowbar was that our initial installation ideas were not going to remain useful as the project and targets expanded. It was important that we could maintain Crowbar AND replace it with something better. The fundamental lesson is that operations around projects is an evolving practice.

    Hindering the evolution by selecting winners early actually slows the development process.

    This may be counter intuitive; most projects want to embrace “easy button” installers to reduce start-up costs. These critical builders of initial traction may actually undermine projects as they enter a operational maturity phase by creating a fidelity gap between initial and sustaining use cases.

    — Rob Hirschfeld

  • Get to Know the New DevOps Stack

    Get to Know the New DevOps Stack

    Deploying software has always been manual and labor-intensive. That’s fading into the past as continuous innovation has become a competitive differentiator for companies of all stages and sizes across every industry.

    DevOps has become a hot investment market in recent years. The mega-rounds we’ve been seeing show the massive demand for tools that enable optimal runtime. Moreover, IT leaders are ready to spend to promote the DevOps culture.

    Companies increasingly are turning to DevOps processes and tools to automate the development life cycle and position themselves to adapt and scale nimbly. But for some companies, the idea of completely overhauling their IT operations processes can seem daunting—they don’t know where to begin. The thing is, adopting DevOps is actually quite simple.

    Examining the Stack

    Developers should bake in automation and agile development from the beginning. The good news, though, is that a defined set of tools to automate each step of the deployment process has emerged. Here’s a breakdown of the new DevOps stack, layer by layer:

    Source Code Repository: Let’s start from the bottom of the stack—from the moment you write the first line of code. Before the open-source movement took off and the cloud enabled easy sharing, developers had to work much more slowly to ensure that the necessary improvements were inserted in the right version of a product. Companies such as GitHub, Atlassian and GitLab provide source-code repositories that facilitate collaboration. Now, engineers can work on the same projects at the same time from halfway around the world without worrying about duplicating efforts.

    Continuous Integration: Newer tools such as CircleCI and TravisCI, as well as older tools such as those offered by Jenkins, automate testing and integration and provide repeatability in the deployment process. Using these tools, developers are able to test their code for failures and bugs as they write it so the code can be fixed before users ever experience the bugs. CI tools give developers something they desperately need to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace: timely feedback. By spending less time waiting on feedback for new code, engineers can resolve software bugs before they grow into full-scale crises.

    Binary Repository: Jfrog and Sonatype provide an end-to-end solution for storing and managing binary artifacts. The binary repository is the system of record closest to the production runtime environment. When something goes wrong, a binary repository such as Artifactory is the first port of call for operations teams. In addition, these tools scan for security vulnerabilities and make it easy to seamlessly distribute software to every corner of the globe.

    Continuous Development: Companies including Chef, Puppet and Ansible automate the next phase of taking data into production. The holy grail for software developers is zero downtime; continuous development tools allow developers to update software while everything remains up and running. These tools also streamline the delivery process by automatically configuring servers and ensuring repeatability of the deployment process.

    Production Environment: Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are in a war over runtime market share in the public cloud. Behind the firewall, Mesosphere, Kubernetes and Docker are trying to dominate the orchestration layers of enterprise private clouds. Customers want the agility and automation that comes from a cohesive DevOps stack but are refusing to be locked into a single vendor at any level. Whichever stack emerges as the default DevOps stack will have to ensure compatibility across public and private clouds.

    About the Author / Andy Vitus

    andyvitusAndy Vitus is a Partner at Scale Venture Partners. He has been investing with Scale for over 12 years and focuses on next-generation enterprise software and new data center technologies, including virtualization and cloud computing. Andy sits on the boards of Arena, Crittercism, DataStax, JFrog, PubNub, Realm Stormpath and Treasure Data. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • Alerts Keep DevOps Teams Responsive, in Sync

    Alerts Keep DevOps Teams Responsive, in Sync

    Continuing our five-part series on “Continuous Monitoring: The Role of DevOps and APM,” this blog post will talk about how alert notification can help DevOps teams be more productive and agile.

    Amid the constant, rapid change and fluidity typical in DevOps organizations, there are some undeniable absolutes. These absolutes, present at each stage of the DevOps life cycle, demand your teams’ attention: A build or test succeeds or it fails; an outage of an app in production is restored to service or it lingers unavailable; users applaud or they blast out complaints. And with each of these states throughout the DevOps life cycle there are absolutes common at every step: Your team is either communicating or they are isolated, and, subsequently, either in sync or operating in confusion and chaos.

    This is still common, but avoidable. The means of communication are more abundant than ever. We can text, email, use collaboration apps or even the obscure method of speaking into a telephone to another human in real time. Yet, despite all these methods, DevOps teams still find themselves taking too long to become aware of issues that need immediate attention or action. Or, we realize too late that multiple people are responding to or chasing down the same issue. Ironically, the easier it is to communicate and even automate communication across all of the different methods, the more likely we get inundated and saturated by what we really need to be paying attention to.

    What’s the best way to cut through all the noise? DevOps teams can:

    1. Filter the junk and cut down on the noise to begin with—without missing something important.
    2. Direct the relevant info only to those people that need to take action, and only when it’s the appropriate time.
    3. Require an acknowledgment that the recipient is taking ownership of the issue.
    4. Or, of course, all of the above.

    There have been tools available over the years to tackle these noise-slaying objectives. Some do a great job getting info to our team’s pertinent DevOps information, but with no way to filter out the irrelevant or redundant stuff. And others can do some of everything, but are complex to set up and maintain and expensive to use.

    DevOps teams I’ve talked to want to be able to:

    • Immediately and automatically send critical, actionable alerts.
    • Route alerts to the right people immediately, but only when it is the appropriate time to do so (don’t wake up the wrong teammate!).
    • Speed alert response with automated acknowledgment and escalation.
    • Automatically communicate through text, email, voice mail and mobile app, all custom-designed for DevOps use cases.

    The prevalent expectation goes beyond easy-to-use, simple to start and maintain solutions. Effective tools also must meet the increasing demand for agile and efficient collaboration among DevOps team members who often use multiple communication tools.

    • Filter out the noise, but don’t miss the important stuff:
      • Filter alerts, (e.g. by problem severity), so you can focus on real problems and disregard IT operations noise. Create custom groups of contacts to make sure the right notifications reach the right team member, and streamline the process of determining who to contact when specific problems occur and how to contact them.
    • Notification channels:
      • Define experts who can respond to problems and store their contact details so they can be notified automatically of problems in their area of responsibility. Users should be organized into groups and so you can send notifications to several users at once. Notifications should able to be sent by email, SMS, mobile app, voice message and chat apps.
    • Alert management and notifications:
      • Tools with policy-based notifications can let you define which type of subject matter you want each person or group to be notified about. You should be able to create filters based on the alerts that occur, customize the filters and assign users and groups who are notified when matching problems occur. Unacknowledged alerts should be escalated automatically after a set time period to the appropriate contact. Filters such as the severity and status of alerts can be created for your IT monitoring requirements.
    • Scheduling:
      • You’ll want to be able to easily set up on-duty and on-call shifts. The process of scheduling is considered to be one the most time-consuming tasks that prevent users from utilizing a notification tool. A good scheduling capability should be intuitive and require minimal steps to use. Users should have the ability to customize or use out-of-the-box templates. Users also should be able to manually create shifts or build in shift patterns, such as follow the sun, to get their scheduling done faster. Scheduling capabilities also should be smart enough to schedule users or groups for weeks in advance.
    • Alert viewer:
      • You’ll also need to be able to monitor alert and notification status in management views, perform actions on alerts, and track them in real time. Seeing key alert information such as alert severity can help you enable to easily prioritize your to-do list. You should be able to track alerts from their receipt by the system through acknowledgment to resolution and changes in an alert history, and use predefined and real-time filters to designate alerts you want to see.

    Utilizing the capabilities such as these can empower you to improve responsiveness, save resolution time and focus on actionable notifications requiring immediate attention.

    About the Author / James Moore

    james-mooreJames Moore is responsible for offering management and strategy for IBM IT Service Management hybrid cloud-based solutions including Runbook Automation and Alert Notification. James joined IBM from the Candle acquisition in 2004, where he was product manager for Candle’s Application Response Time product lines.  James has more than 15 years’ experience in business service management, application performance management and event management. Connect with James on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • Industry Alignment: Supporting Real-World DevOps Workflows

    Industry Alignment: Supporting Real-World DevOps Workflows

    In our ongoing work to advance the interests of customers around adoption of Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery, the theme of evolving workflows to better suit human-scale work cycles often comes to the fore.

    While  it’s easy to say that build, test, release and monitoring capacities should feed into each other to promote continuous collaboration, realizing this vision in the form of integrated tooling is still no trivial feat. And it is further exacerbated by the reality that DevOps teams typically utilize a wide range of products built by a diverse set of providers, from larger players such as CA Technologies to open-source projects.

    If the goal is to drive  application lifecycle processes and supporting technology to better support human work cycles—along with accelerating organizational velocity and improving quality—somewhere in this domain of tooling integration there’s a need for relevant vendors to participate.

    That work officially begins today.

    At the Jenkins World 2016 conference this week, CA, along with a dozen other leading DevOps solutions providers and the DevOps Institute, announced the DevOps Express consortium. Joining us, along with CloudBees and Sonatype, which spearheaded this effort, are Atlassian, BlazeMeter, Chef, GitHub, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA and SonarSource.

    So what’s the big deal? The direction of this initiative—which will focus first on supplying reference architectures that describe field-tested integrations of best-in-breed solutions—strikes directly at the heart of the central DevOps tenet: collaboration.

    The immediate result is that these providers are moving to boost interoperability across a typical production DevOps toolchain. It is truly noteworthy that these solutions providers, some of whom maintain palpable competitive interests, are putting aside those considerations to advance the interests of end users; that is a very DevOps phenomenon.

    In many other areas of IT, this type of cross-pollination either never commences or doesn’t emerge until the sector is so well-established that industry collaboration seems more of an effort to fend off perceptions of commoditization. To anyone familiar with the incredible pace of innovation ongoing in the automation sector, and the potential for competition between many of the companies involved in DevOps Express, it should be immediately obvious that this is a partnership that truly puts customers first.

    Yet, if we’re serious about empowering the kind of wholesale software factory reinvention that we espouse around DevOps, this is something that had to take place. How can an industry talk endlessly about eliminating stovepipes and marrying long disparate processes, and then defer to a walled garden worldview as it relates to the enabling products? That certainly wouldn’t really add up.

    It’s amazing to see what’s going on in the world of technology these days, and ever more exciting to be a part of it. We’re proud to be a member of DevOps Express.

    It’s a great time to be involved in this space.

    — Jeff Scheaffer

  • Chef Boards the DevOps Express with CloudBees, Others

    Chef Boards the DevOps Express with CloudBees, Others

    You often may have more questions than answers as you progress along your DevOps journey. Which tools should I choose? Do these tools work well together? What have other people done in my situation? You’re often left Googling to find the right integrations and piece together an architectural solution.

    Today, I’m excited to announce that Chef is joining DevOps Express, a new industry initiative comprised of 14 leading DevOps vendors and service providers. Led by CloudBees and Sonatype, and including everyone from Atlassian to GitHub, this initiative is focused on creating solutions that will help you adopt DevOps practices. Specifically, by defining reference architectures and highlighting best practices, supported integrations and solutions, we believe that DevOps Express will simplify and accelerate DevOps adoption for organizations of all kinds.

    DevOps Express uses popular technologies spanning multiple solution components to provide a framework for building reference architectures that are better integrated and supported. Creating reliable and actionable reference architectures for organizations will ease DevOps adoption and minimize risk for organizations.

    DevOps is collaborative by its very nature—it’s all about bringing teams together. This includes cultural transformation, breaking down silos between disparate teams and working together around the common goal of adding value for customers. These principles are just as true for us, the vendors providing tools to help you on your DevOps journey. We, too, must break down silos and work together to provide more value for you, our common customer. I’m looking forward to what we’ll build.

    About the Author / James Casey

    james_caseyJames Casey is vice president of Partner Integration at Chef. His career spans more than 15 years in companies ranging from mobile and finance startups to CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web. He specializes in building tools for operating large computing infrastructures. He previously created monitoring tools at CERN for the Large Hadron Collider.

  • Enlisting the C-Suite in Disaster Recovery Initiatives

    Enlisting the C-Suite in Disaster Recovery Initiatives

    When disasters make headlines, corporate executives often have knee-jerk reactions and call for business continuity solutions to be implemented immediately. However, when push comes to shove, those very same executives tend to put up roadblocks with concerns over budget, priorities, vulnerability assessments and security.

    Perhaps more concerning, according to a June 2015 Ponemon Institute report, there are “a large portion of companies who remain vulnerable as a result of lack of executive interest in preparing for worst-case scenarios.” This creates a precarious situation for DevOps professionals that understand the severity and breadth of threats that can trigger downtime—from human error to power outages, cyberattacks and natural disasters.

    To expedite disaster recovery initiatives, IT teams must enlist top executives that influence budgeting directly. This often calls for varied approaches that speak to specific executive concerns and issues.

    Understand Your Options: Disaster Recovery vs. Backup

    It’s very common for companies to confuse disaster recovery and backup solutions. Both are available via cloud, giving teams access to capabilities that were once only available to enterprises with huge IT footprints. When you approach any executive, it’s critical to understand various services and how they can work in tandem to deliver the most cost-effective protection.

    Backup ensures companies do not completely lose data because it is backed up with copies. While it is important to have copies of data, accessing and restoring backups can take some time. Therefore, for workloads with important but not extremely time-sensitive data, backup can be sufficient while satisfying budget restrictions. In the fast-paced DevOps world, backup usually falls short.

    On the other hand, cloud-based disaster recovery ensures minimal—if any—downtime. Applications can fail over and be up in running in seconds. Further, testing can be done at will without any impact on production environments. For workloads that demand continuity of service and aggressive recovery point objectives (RPOs), disaster recovery solutions are the better option and can also deliver cost efficiencies.

    For many operational and regulatory compliance reasons, companies may require a mix of both backup and disaster recovery. When evaluating service providers, check into how easy it is to apply backup and disaster recovery based on your development and application requirements. Take a close look at pricing models associated with each—including any support fees.

    CEO/COO – Chief Executive Officer and/or Chief Operations Officer

    While CEOs and COOs generally delegate detailed budget decisions to their teams, they are still ultimately responsible for overall company performance and reputation. Anything that threatens ongoing conduct of the business is their purview. Be prepared to discuss risks in real terms, and clarify that a “disaster” can be triggered by something as simple as human error.  They will care most about considerations such as:

    • Time to business resumption [e.g. near-zero recovery time objective (RTO)]
    • Capital investment via pay-as-you-go options
    • Ability to prioritize data and workloads, both for budgetary and business continuity purposes
    • Data loss estimates, in the case of a disaster
    • Testing flexibility, to ensure an operational, reliable solution
    • Independent validation from similar customers or analysts that a solution is reliable, proven and cost-effective

    CIO – Chief Information Officer

    Theoretically, this should be the easiest executive to convince because the CIO has a personal stake in recovery, but remember CIOs have a tough balancing act between controlling budgets and limiting exposure. The 6 Disaster Recovery Doppelgangers quiz and e-book can help CIOs approach their disaster recovery challenges across the organization. CIOs generally focus on:

    • Ability to see and manage the recovery process
    • Scalability of resources with on-demand access, often honing in on flexible terms
    • Security and compliance capabilities and support
    • Testing at will to ensure solution performs despite configuration changes to the day-to-day operational environment

    CFO – Chief Financial Officer

    Everything boils down to financials for CFOs, so they should be approached from a fiscal angle that demonstrates value backed by metrics. Be prepared with unbiased, independent information that appeals to their risk averse nature. What other financial benefits might come from leveraging cloud-based disaster recovery? For example, in some cases DevOps teams are beginning to use the failover cloud as a load testing environment that would otherwise require significant on-premise investments. Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) environments with advanced security can also be used to check for possible vulnerabilities to cyberthreats.

    CFOs often care about:

    • Flexible pricing options that can be tailored at a granular level based on services required
    • Pay-as-you-go pricing models that avoid upfront capital investment
    • Geographic constraints on their data, particularly if backups or failovers need to be maintained in a specific location due to jurisdiction requirements
    • Extended DR use cases that could offset other costs like security testing and quality assurance

    CMO – Chief Marketing Officer

    On top of branding, advertising and public relations responsibilities, CMOs have key objectives that pertain to customer loyalty and overall corporate reputation. They may not be interested in the details of services, but can be a powerful advocate that can speak to the need for business continuity solutions that will protect brand image, reinforce messages about your technology innovation and maintain excellent customer support. Familiarize yourself with real-world stories that demonstrate how media—both traditional and social—cover outages and their negative impact to business. One need not look further than the recent Delta and Southwest outages.

    The concept of DevOps is about culture as much as it is about technology, and communication and collaboration are key. By understanding the needs and responsibilities of all stakeholders involved, teams can cut through politics, efficiently protect business and begin to leverage cloud-based DR technologies for initiatives far beyond recovery, alone.

    About the Author / Lilac Schoenbeck

    iLand Head Shots 4/22/14

    Lilac Schoenbeck is vice president of Product Management and Marketing at iLand. She has nearly 20 years of experience with product management, marketing, strategy, business development and software engineering in the grid, virtualization and cloud domains. She is currently vice president of marketing at iland, a global enterprise cloud hosting provider. Prior to this role, she led cloud and automation marketing for BMC Software and has worked for IBM, Fortisphere, Innosight and the Globus Alliance. Lilac holds an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and a Computer Science degree from Pacific Lutheran University.

  • Communication Skills Matter in DevOps

    Communication Skills Matter in DevOps

    While the precise definition of DevOps is an evolving matter, a simple way to describe it is this: DevOps is a change of mindset toward an agile and inclusive approach to IT. DevOps enables IT professionals to think and work beyond technology silos, thereby deriving meaningful results at a faster rate than with more traditional methodologies.

    This involves going outside of our comfort zones and collaborating outside the confines of our own cliques. By working across operational boundaries, DevOps will require an understanding of technical, operational and service aspects of the business. This means the heart of DevOps lies not in technology, methodology nor administration: The heart of DevOps lies in communication, which brings all these together.

    DevOps professionals seem to agree. In Incapsula’s DevOps Salary Survey conducted in 2015, the California-based cybersecurity firm identified communication skills as one of the highest priorities for DevOps professionals, almost as much as operational skills.

    In other words, effective communication across the organization is considered as important as actually building the product, and it is integral to building the product itself. This means when you’re in the field of DevOps, a smart investment in communication skills will pay off for both individuals and the team.

    Communication Fosters Teamwork

    There usually exists a disjoint between technical and non-technical departments, particularly in technology companies. Engineers, for example, might be fascinated by an elegant piece of code, an algorithm that automatically governs a process or an infrastructure that does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But to the rest of the organization, those things take place purely in the background and work best when they aren’t noticed at all.

    Tech people take pride in the technology, while operations people take pride in business results. The two often find themselves at odds due to a lack of communication about what is really needed, and how to get there. Successful communication in DevOps focuses on finding common ground and working toward achieving this.

    For communication to be effective, the emphasis should be on the user of your message. You’ll need to have a deeper understanding of where they’re coming from. No amount of expertise matters if you can’t convey it properly. You can’t gain any growth or value for your career or organization if there is always a unidirectional disconnect.

    Bottom line is, you need to correctly identify your intended recipients and find a common ground to better engage.

    You Can Increase Your Value as a DevOps Pro

    Trust is an essential component of teamwork, which is also important in the development life cycle and in decision-making processes. Being a communicator enables you to better establish trust among your colleagues—something that, unfortunately, is lacking in many IT project life cycles.

    This is why pure technologists don’t necessarily make good DevOps professionals—an observation highlighted by the Incapsula survey, which shows that a mix of general and technical skills are essential for a successful DevOps career. In fact, general skills are usually more important in securing higher-paying jobs in this field. These include understanding business operations, developing communication skills and remaining flexible and open to change. In addition, the rising trend in outsourcing DevOps pros across a global talent pool means your communication skills have to transcend languages and contexts.

    A good DevOps professional knows that value is not just about the technology, but rather about the product. Even the best technologies in the world are just abstract concepts until you translate them into a product people can actually use and enjoy. Thus, going beyond technical capabilities, you will need to know how to collaborate to transform technologies into useful and marketable products.

    You Can Advance Your Career Faster

    Chatting up the project managers, glad-handing the operational staff and picking the brains of departmental leaders may not come naturally to pure technologists. However, for DevOps professionals increasingly engaged in conversations across the enterprise, knowing the language unique to the organizational culture—verbal and nonverbal—can make all the difference in terms of career advancement.

    Such organizational language can be considered as its own kind of coding. This facilitates everything from a working knowledge of financial reporting, to the listening skills needed to understand the technology goals meaningful to each business unit. It’s also how unwritten rules about business priorities or hierarchies are communicated.

    After all, the career survey cites at least 26 job descriptions among DevOps professionals, including project manager and operations manager, among others. This means you don’t necessarily have to get stuck in one position or job description. In an organization that fosters the DevOps culture, your value goes well beyond your technical capabilities, but rather the focus is more on organizational skills.

    The Takeaway

    Since DevOps involves cross-functional teams instead of compartmentalized departments, everyone will need to be more involved in business operations, product development and support. Being an effective communicator is at the heart of all this, and it can spell the difference between success and failure in a DevOps environment.

    It’s easy to think that there is little more to learn in terms of communication, especially if your DevOps integration is already mature and your team is functioning optimally. However, your investment in becoming a better DevOps communicator begins with learning the language and culture of the organization. This also includes a continuous reassessment of skills and the ability to build connections from each and every encounter with colleagues, partners and other stakeholders.

    About the Author / Laureen Fagan

    LaureenFaganA senior PR counsel and thought leader, Laureen Fagan has 15 years experience as a media and PR professional, which includes her stint at CBS and Fox broadcast affiliates in the United States, and in print and wire-service newsrooms in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Jerusalem. Laureen received her MSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and completed additional graduate study at University of Notre Dame in Theology / Hebrew Bible that includes French, Arabic and Hebrew study. In addition to tech and business, Laureen creates informed content and deep analysis on international affairs, health care, culture and religion.

     

  • DevOps: The Glue of Workflow

    DevOps: The Glue of Workflow

    The best tool in the DevOps continuum is the sticky wrapper that holds it all together. It is the workflow that binds it and makes sense out of the term “continuous.”  CIOs often are enamored with a build or deploy tool, but it is the workflow tool in every DevOps strategy encapsulating more than one function that is the real hero. Imagine having the perfect test automation scripts but no way to execute them outside of constructing a new build. Or imagine having the perfect CMDB integration scripts but no way to call them outside of the build process. Or even worse, imagine having the need for human approval before a deployment takes place (or is promoted), and no way to integrate it outside of a custom deployment process.

    Lean DevOps Construction

    Attempting to make very few tools perform these functions without a workflow engine ultimately forces automation engineers to create functionality within a tool it was never designed to perform. Conversely, when a workflow wrapper is available, build and deployment processes can remain small, elegant and consistent, allowing the workflow engine to integrate extended functionality into the continuous delivery cycle.  Size of the automation constructs you create does matter: the smaller the better.

    Using Lean methodologies in your DevOps services, it is better to break down automation constructs into the logical functions they are intended to provide. Build automation, for example, should not have to include extensions to turn monitoring functions on or off. Build automation also should not have to worry about the deployment process; its primary singular purpose is to construct a new build. Where that new build is then deployed becomes the single purpose of the deployment process.  Attempting to automate the entire cycle of an application into one automation construct from end to end (instead of smaller blocks that work together) increases both size and risk (as well as length of time to execute) of that one event.

    Dealing with Humans in the Automation

    Human integration is the bane of DevOps processes. Every time you have to pause automation to obtain a human approval, you introduce time delays that cannot be predicted or occur with consistency. Imagine a deployment process that requires a human to press “yes” before continuing. The introduction of a human approval can sit idle on a tooling screen for hours during lunch, or unexpected days off, or vacations (when others are afraid to take responsibility for passing a substandard build, even for further testing). Deployment tools can integrate human responses, but this is not their forte. They are generally ill-equipped to use multiple contact methods, go up the management chain when needed or ping a mobile device when preferred by the user listed as responsible. Workflow tools are ideal for all of these human-contact logistics.

    The challenge during DevOps service construction in utilizing a workflow wrapper is keeping human interaction to the absolute minimum required by outside regulating agencies and still achieve compliance. The alternative is to automate processes with such quality and consistency so that human interaction would merely become redundant and unnecessary. The workflow wrapper is not an excuse to simply automate what human interaction you have today. Instead, it is a highly functioning tool to allow you to redesign more-effective automation processes, limiting human interaction where possible. The goal is to build small, independent automation constructs that work together in a highly efficient manner.

    Hold the Presses

    Communication or notifications also can be handled in a workflow wrapper much better than in individual DevOps toolings. Imagine for a moment that I am a release manager, wanting to know the progress (or rather obstructions to progress) for my new application. To accomplish this notification process, it would have to be embedded within my build process (to know if it passed or failed). The alternative is that my workflow wrapper checks the build logs and can send me notification in the method I prefer (email, text message, an Instagram pic of Thelma and Louise over the cliff, etc.) In addition, I may not actually want to check the status of every build submitted, as that becomes noise after a while. I may want to know only when a build candidate has passed and is ready for promotion to a further testing environment. Since my workflow wrapper would be aware of this, it could automate the notification to me quite easily.

    Now add the consideration of management chain to this notification process. If I am out on vacation (which I expect to be able to do, since DevOps enables my personal life), my manager or my sponsoring executive may want to be notified if my application is not going to production for some reason during my absence. This is a level of automation that most build or deploy tools are simply not designed for. They have no idea who I report to and who that person reports to. But that departmental notification escalation chains can be incorporated easily into a workflow wrapper, and execute as expected while I am away (including pinging my cell phone just in case I need to jump in and fix something).

    Release Management Solutions

    Most release management (RM) or release orchestration (RO) tools have at least minimal workflow capabilities built into their offerings. Whether this capability is enough for your organization or whether you need a more capable workflow engine to wrap around it is a decision only you can make. Most release management tooling is designed to put an elegant wrapper around build automation and deployment automation. It usually contains the ability to segment by line of business or product, as well as role-based access controls (RBAC) for permissions and auditory compliance. And it usually contains at least elementary notification capabilities. What RM excels at are human interaction and tracking progress, and so it does meet the needs of many companies.

    When RM is not enough is usually when the DevOps services you provide begins to extend into ancillary services and secondary automation integration capabilities. Examples include monitoring systems integration, multiple testing tooling integration/evaluation, configuration management database (CMDB) integration and capacity-on-demand environment provisioning.  Highly evolved notification systems tend to require an external workflow wrapper beyond the normal capabilities an RM tool offers. A solid workflow wrapper acts as the glue that can hold disparate DevOps tooling (either from different vendors or performing different functions) together with further super-automation processes above them like an overarching umbrella.

    Impacts to the Bottom Line

    Choosing to offer DevOps services without any form of a workflow wrapper is like going hunting with an excellent rifle and no bullets: a lot of capability that can never reach the potential it was intended for. On the other hand, obsessing about replicating current processes within a workflow tool is like hunting a bunny rabbit with a bazooka: way too much damage caused when trying to keep things small and elegant. The key is to balance the use of a powerful tool (workflow), with Lean thinking in automation processes and constructs. Keep the building blocks small and functionally oriented; limit human interaction; and use workflow for the functions it is best-suited for—connection and communication.

    The technical capabilities a workflow wrapper will add to your DevOps solutions are substantial. Your services will be far more efficient and far more powerful. However, to truly assess the financial impact of a highly functioning workflow system, one must determine the value of time and decision-making. An elegant notification system can keep you informed without sending you countless emails you learn to ignore or flooding your text inbox with data that exceeds your cellular plan. In this way, notifications are meaningful, and you can begin to make meaningful business decisions based on the information you receive, only at the times you need to see it. What is that worth to you and your organization? Only you could really assess that.

    To continue the conversation, feel free to contact me.